‘Miniscule stories from a master of the form … It’s nearly impossible to categorise Williams’ work. She interrogates both the mundane and the metaphysical. In story after story, she upends what readers have grown to expect from traditional narratives — a beginning, middle, and end, to say the least — sometimes leaving us without any of those elements at all. A Williams story might be made up of a fragment of dialogue, a thought, a description, or some combination of these … Mysterious, gemlike, and strange.’
Kirkus Reviews
‘You can always count on Diane Williams, head literary weirdo and “godmother of flash fiction” for a good time — if you consider having your mind blown to be a good time, which you should. Her latest book has 33 short pieces guaranteed to shift the world around you, if only for a moment.’
Lit Hub
‘Spry, sly, and spirited, Williams’ very short stories — most are a couple of pages long — are brilliantly unsettling … Williams’ clean sentences are uncluttered, but strangely surprising, and the stories themselves have mysterious depths, a teasing sense of meaning and connection that can never be quite explained or articulated.’
Eithne Farry, Daily Mail
‘How much can one writer do with how little? Williams is so intelligent, fearless, and tough, she does extraordinary things within the constraints of her own stringent rules.’
Heather Cass White, Times Literary Supplement
‘Every event, thought, image, phrase, and word are given equal opportunity to claim or elude your attention. Turn the pages and see what stands out to you. You might be surprised.’
Chicago Review of Books
‘The short stories in Williams’ eleventh collection — I Hear You’re Rich— are some of her very best. Alluring and allusive, the 33 beautifully wrought literary miniatures in this volume — the shortest of which is a single sentence of 23 words — are characteristically attuned to what Williams describes as “those exigencies, calamities that underpin everyday life”. Taken together, these distinctive — and sometimes surprisingly comedic — stories confirm Williams is indeed one of the most important US writers working today.’
Alexander Howard, The Conversation
‘Williams delights … What a treat! Life is rendered immediate and fresh through her eyes as she takes on the simplest of subjects — affairs, a request for money, the act of carrying a cake — with precision and gusto.’
RUSSH Magazine
‘These 33 stories, a few as short as a paragraph, pack inordinate complexity into tiny spaces and take unpredictable turns toward unexpected conclusions … From the elusiveness of love to the desire for escape, the themes here are hard to mine in flash fiction. That Williams does so is a tribute to her talent.’
Shelf Awareness, starred review
‘Like looking into the deep, expressive eyes of a person … struggling against forces that are not always clear to them.’
The New York Times Book Review
‘Williams’s sentences are syntactically flexible, spasmodic, surprising … Flip to a random page and you’ll likely find at least one question. The world for Williams’s characters is an endlessly baffling place — which might be another way of saying it’s endlessly interesting.’
Southwest Review
‘It takes a master of the short story form to craft truly incisive slice-of-life fiction, and Diane Williams proves that she’s among the best with her latest collection, I Hear You’re Rich… In each brief story, we see the entirety of the human experience bubbling underneath.’
West Trade Review
‘You might call Diane Williams’s plots dreamlike — they proceed according to their own mysterious logic, interrupting themselves — but they’re not hazy … [Williams] turn[s] the everyday stuff of realist fiction into props for existential fun houses … I Hear You’re Rich will please fans of Lydia Davis and David Lynch.’
Vulture
‘Stories that offer glimpses into the mundane and exhilarating beauty of everyday life.’
The Millions
Praise for The Collected Stories of Diane Williams:
‘Full of funny, libidinal, and invigorating enigmas … Readers who love the arresting phrase, the surprising word, will gravitate to her … It’s perfect to leave on the bedside table, to be consulted before one’s dreamlife begins.’
Ange Mlinko, The London Review of Books
Praise for The Collected Stories of Diane Williams:
‘Erudite, elegant, and stubbornly experimental. For any writer, an omnibus collection is a triumph. To see years of Ms Williams’ confounding fictions collected in so hefty a volume is like seeing snowflakes accrue into an avalanche.’
Rumaan Alam, The New York Times
Praise for How High? — That High:
‘Williams is a magician of the miniature … Don’t let their diminutive stature fool you: these pieces pack a punch. Brief, elliptical, steeped in longing — or is that lust? — they offer slices of life that rely on interior more than exterior details, which is to say they are small road maps of the soul … All the pieces here … are rigorous in both language and emotion, using nuance and inference to explore the implications, the contradictions, that people rarely share aloud … Williams’ small gems are as dense and beautiful as diamonds, compressed from the carbon of daily life.’
Kirkus Reviews
Praise for How High? — That High:
‘Williams returns with a collection showcasing her mastery of succinct and suggestive stories … Williams’ prose evokes both strangeness and familiarity as she gets at the core of what it means to live into one’s later years. This is by no means for everyone, but it will surely satisfy fans of well-wrought fiction.’
Publishers Weekly
Praise for Diane Williams:
‘I would describe Williams as the writer who saved my life — or my soul, if one believes such a thing exists ... [Williams’] stories, many no longer than a page, suggest that what is left unsaid between people remains more powerful than what they have the capacity to articulate. Although Williams studied with Gordon Lish (and before that, with Philip Roth), her minimalism is distinctive for its sublimity and its spirituality, its ability to evoke the laws of a world apart.’
Merve Emre, The New Yorker
Praise for Diane Williams:
‘Williams can do more with two sentences than most writers can do with two hundred pages.’
The New York Review of Books
Praise for Diane Williams:
‘Not a single moment of the prose, here, is what you expect, and even the ordinary is, in the context created by Diane Williams, no longer ordinary: it is fresh, happy, and peculiar — or is it we who are refreshed, happy, and more peculiar than before after reading her?’
Lydia Davis
Praise for Diane Williams:
‘This book will rewire your brain.’
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